This week: Thesauruses, Greek legends of old, and all the crap we keep on our desks. Really. Let’s get into it.
Three loosely connected thoughts:
Scale Problems
My copy of Roget’s Thesaurus wasn’t really even mine. Like so many other artifacts of my youth, I borrowed it from my dad’s office one day and it just never really got put back1. I have no idea where it is now. It disappeared between one move or another and, to be honest, I never really missed it. By the time I graduated from college, dictionaries and thesauruses had moved online. It was (and is) far easier to reach out and search for the word or phrase you needed rather than walk all the way over to the shelf on the other side of the room (which might as well be a million miles away with my knees) and get an actual book down. But I found myself thinking about artifacts the other day.
See, I had a drafting desk when I was in high school. Mom and Dad got it for me after I fell in serious like with mechanical drawing in junior high school. And I covered it with artifacts - my triangular architect’s scale ruler, my set of graphite drawing pencils, my sketchbooks and stencils - that changed as I moved away from drafting and towards writing. By the end of high school, the scale ruler had been forgotten and the pencils all used up. And so, new artifacts: a used copy of Webster’s Dictionary, a couple books of quotes and proverbs, notebooks, and, Roget’s Thesaurus.
I still cover my desk with stuff. I think most of us do. I keep a paper schedule book rather than use my phone and I have a stand filled with fountain pens and drawing pencils and blank sketchbooks and notebooks. Artifacts.
Birds Do It
One of the hazards of teaching is falling into the “do as I say, not as I do” trap. And if I’m being honest, there’s one particular trap I fall into all the time - I hand in my rough draft as my final draft. When I started writing Learned, I deliberately set out to challenge myself to write quickly and to write in a less-formal, more bloggy2 style. All my other writing at the time was either academic, wherein revision is a necessary and lengthy part of the process, or fiction, wherein revision is a necessary and soul-crushingly frustrating part of the process. I wanted something quick and easy that would be fun for me to write but that would not consume all my waking hours.
For the most part, I’ve stayed true to that. I rarely do a second draft of Learned3 articles. Instead, this place is pretty much a WYSIWYG4. But that means that I have gotten out of the habit of revising and I feel like I’m losing the skill. I have so many zero-draft essays sitting in a virtual file drawer waiting for me to come back and clean them up and put them out into the world. Some of them, however, have been waiting so long they have become a kind of Ship of Theseus - if every word of an essay has been replaced, is it still the same essay5?
After all, a rough draft I wrote when I was 30 is not the same rough draft I would write today. It’s impossible to do something for years and not have the process evolve; has my style changed too much? Has my tone? Are those things artifacts that should be recovered and set up on my desk again? Then again, you can take a song, change the key, invert the melody, alter the pitch and the tempo, but it’s still the same song, isn’t it? Change the words, keep the theme, change the tone, keep the message? Maybe.
Garden Walls
One of the unforeseen consequences of social media is that people have stopped going to websites. Not altogether, of course, but as a deliberate act of online reading. Let me explain - most people’s first stop on the information superhighway, these days, is through an app that holds them in a walled garden. You look through Facebook or Twitter or YouTube and you never leave that place. Find something you want to read? Save it for later. Find a link to an interesting site? Read through it and forget about it. If you need it again, Google will get you there.
Contrast that to the early days of the free web. People were moving away from the earliest forms of web-surfing (looking at you AOL) and installing Netscape and Internet Explorer on their computers. You navigated directly to a site you wanted to read. Search was limited and addresses clumsy. But it worked. And then, as the garden walls got built, we got out of the habit. As a result, some of the old sites are being forgotten about6.
I was forcibly reminded of this the other day when I was searching online for a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. I was well into the second page of search results before it occurred to me to check Project Gutenberg7, a site that used to be my first stop for digital editions of old books. How had I forgotten it? Because it had become an artifact of a world wide web I didn’t use anymore. My impulse is to go straight to Google to find what I need. Only Google is becoming less and less reliable. You have to get through the targeted ads and purchased results before you can begin to find any unbiased search returns. And even then those results get filtered by spelling corrections, geophysical location, time, and all the other things we don’t like knowing that Google knows about us. And so our artifacts are getting buried in the detritus of ads and sponsored links.
There’s talk these days of efforts to rebuild the world wide web, to get past all the tracking and advertisements. I don’t know if they will be successful. I hope they will. In the meantime, I’ve been browsing around on gutenberg.org and guess what I found shoved into a virtual corner with the dictionaries and quote books? It’s not the exact edition, of course, but it’s nice to have Roget’s Thesaurus back with me after all these years, there on the corner of my virtual desktop with all the other notepads and sketchbooks and apps and folders and artifacts.
Stay curious,
J
By the time I got around to returning it, Dad had replaced it with a newer edition. Fast forward to today and my daughter has permanently borrowed all my best drawing tools. Ah, tradition.
It’s a word.
I know, I know. Maybe I should. I definitely should.
What You See Is What You Get.
Even if I did get around to cleaning them up for public consumption, where should I put them? I’m not sure they fit into the brief of what I’m doing with this newsletter and I’m not sure I have the stamina to start another.
Weirdly, the exception to this seems to be independent webcomics. Sure, a lot of them are on Instagram and Tumblr, but there are a lot that just refuse to go with anything other than an updated-daily website. Respect.
Project Gutenberg is a venerated elder as far as online non-profits go. What they do is save old books.
Funnily enough, I just fell upon a webcomic website for "Pepper & Carrot" and thought it was strange to see an entire website dedicated to one series, even though years ago I'd have considered it absolutely normal.
On the topic of editing old drafts, I find it a good experience to write about a topic I've already covered in the past (whether published or not). Sometimes the message doesn't change. Sometimes, nuances arise. And sometimes, I compare the two wondering how I ever thought they had the same original idea.
So agree on Google, often I feel I use it because I am lazy…but I know there are better options. And thanks for the reminder about Project Gutenberg. Last year I found myself in the American Library in Paris and joined…they introduced me to PG among other things. How I love libraries!